PORTLAND, Ore. — Chief Bob Day has issued a new call to add more sworn officers to Portland Police Bureau's ranks, and he's setting a target number: 1,037 sworn officers, an increase of well over 300 over the bureau's current roster, which stood at 798 sworn officers as of 2023.
According to a presentation linked in a blog post, Day and his staff arrived at the number by calculating Portland's number of sworn officers per 1,000 residents and comparing it to the equivalent figures for Seattle, Denver, Sacramento, Albuquerque, Fresno, Mesa and Oakland.
Portland had the lowest ratio out of those cities with 1.23 officers per 1,000 residents as of 2023, according to the presentation, with the average being about 1.6 officers per 1,000 people. PPB staffing bottomed out with 776 officers in 2022 — the lowest number since at least 2005 — before gaining 22 officers the following year.
Those figures all refer to the number of actual officers on staff as opposed to the number of authorized positions, because PPB has a large number of vacancies. The bureau had an authorized total of 882 officer positions as of 2023. Day's target of 1,037 officers would be a record high, though not by much — the bureau had 1,035 authorized positions in 2005.
Day said his decision to issue the call came after about a year on the job, during which he's seen increased community engagement with the police bureau but found that "the demand and the expectation, appropriately so, is far greater than what we currently have."
When asked why the bureau would need more officers when violent crime has been dropping for the past two years, Day said his call for more personnel was not just about crime, but about improving the bureau's relationship with Portlanders — although he noted that other figures such as homicides and traffic fatalities haven't seen as much improvement.
The current staffing levels also lead to bad financial and resource management, Day said, pointing to the bureau's steadily growing overtime budget, long and inconsistent wait times for people who call emergency services, and issues like officer burnout.
The bureau could eventually seek as many as 1,200 officers, he added, but he said that would be a long-term strategy and the current target was chosen because it felt "achievable over the course of the next couple, two or three years."
Things are off to a good start, he added, with 2024 shaping up to be the bureau's third-highest year of the past decade in terms of its hiring rate. There were also more new applicants this year than in any of the prior three years, he said, and the retirement attrition rate, although still high, has been trending downward due to the bureau's retire-rehire program.
Day said the bureau will likely finish out 2024 with about 800 officers and he expects to be able to add about 75-80 per year over the next two years, which after accounting for retirements would put PPB on track to have at least 900 officers by the start of 2027.
"We have a window of time here, particularly over the next 18 months to 2 years, to, I think, really begin to right-size the ship," he said.
The goal comes with "a significant budget ask," Day acknowledged, but he said Mayor Ted Wheeler has been supportive of the effort and the bureau plans to continue to push for funding to add more positions when the next mayor and city council take office in the new year. It means spending more on police up front, he said, but would eventually be balanced out somewhat by a decreased need for overtime.
"Right now, it's just — this is not a sustainable way to do business," he said.
